This restaurant – stylised as BLACK Market, and painted to match – is part of the Caffeinees group, and co-located with their namesake restaurant Chateau de Caffeinees, Yamaguchi Fish Market, and a drive through chocolate truffle shop, in the middle of nowhere really. Well, that’s not quite fair, as it’s near IKEA and quite close to the enormous building site which is the Tun Razak Exchange area, but it must be hard to get passing trade.
It does ‘western’ and fusion food using top end ingredients, such as lobster, iberico pork, and truffles, with a number of dishes being tailored for a Malaysian palate. The restaurant took over an abandoned building, which might be why there’s a tree growing in the middle of it. On the other hand, some of the design choices, like the Regency portraits, are esoteric enough that you feel maybe the greenery was planted specially.
We actually ended up sitting outside as the interior was very noisy due to a birthday party. It was airy enough, with fans over all the tables. I went for truffle linguine, apparently based on a famous dish the founder had in Australia. He might have misremembered, as while it had a wonderful truffle aroma and flavour, it also had an egg cracked into it, which detracted from the experience. Just the yolk could have worked, I think.
The Real Paddington linguine had shavings of ham and bacon in, rather than bear, fortunately. Daughter tucked in, saying the meat was salty and nice, though she didn’t like the Japanese egg. Wife tried a little, and thought it was the best dish between us.
She had mixed feelings about her pork and cockle curry noodles, as the pork was too boar like and the curry was a little oily. However, the fresh cockles and other bits (such as foo chok) were good. Chicken wings were apparently pretty standard.
Black Market promises an upmarket experience, and doesn’t really deliver. While the food had promise, it wasn’t up to the price tag; similarly, while the staff were friendly, the service level wasn’t great. Meals came out one at a time about once every 15 minutes, and each diner had therefore finished by the time the next arrived. The waiter who brought our water didn’t bring glasses, then when the glasses came he rushed off without opening the bottle (or leaving a bottle opener, either would have been ok!). Hopefully this was just due to being very busy. I’ll probably try the Chateau before I came here again, though.
Address: 16 Jalan Kampung Pandan, 55100 Kuala Lumpur
Telephone: 0173218686
Website: http://www.blackmarketrestaurants.com/index.php
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